13 August 2009

The recent “big switchover” to digital television is
now a familiar example of Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
regulation as well as the subsequent economic impact of such
decisions. A similar situation occurs in wireless communications which
forces commercial cellular carriers, such as AT&T and Verizon to
invest heavily in purchasing spectrum licenses to meet the growing
demand of their customers for mobile services. As opposed to a
television station that essentially broadcasts continuously, in
wireless communication systems, typically less than 15% of the radio
spectrum assigned to a carrier is in use at any given time and
place. Thus, an efficient management of the spectrum could, in
principle, increase six times the number of users without any
additional bandwidth and reduce the cost of services
significantly.

Cognitive radio is an emerging and revolutionary concept intended to
resolve this problem. A wireless system with cognition capability
could intelligently identify sub-bands of the radio spectrum that are
currently not in use and assign them to secondary users, without
interfering with the primary users.

A recent two-year grant awarded to ECE assistant professor
Shuangqing Wei (right), and Rajgopal Kannan, associate professor in LSU's
Department of Computer Science, along with matching from Bascom
Hunter, a local business, will enable the team to transfer their
research in network topology and cross-layer optimization to this
exciting area and develop techniques to coordinate the sharing of
scarce radio spectrum to the largest extent. “Cognitive radio is
a promising technology. The generous support from Bascom Hunter will
enable us to pursue cutting-edge research in this area, which will
further lead to more research and business opportunities, and thus
promote our national competitiveness in wireless
communications,” said Wei. Given the value of radio spectrum,
the work has tremendous research and business opportunities, which
will further promote LSU's research profile and competitiveness in the
field of wireless communications in the nation.